World: r3wp

henrik, you can know by reading the developer docs. but you will 
also make examples and explain it so that knowledge of the internals 
of pdfmaker is not necessary :)

e.g. http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/pdf-maker.html#section-3
gives a description of the dialect that you can base the user docs 
on.

e.g. (above url) gives a description of the dialect that you can 
base the user docs on. (text was not visible in previous post)

Anton, only a few things of the text dialect are implemented. i wanted 
to get to a working version as soon as possible so that i could test 
the typesetter easily.

iirc underline is not supported directly by PDF, but the new typesetter 
could probably add that. not high pri right now (although qml will 
need it - actually, it'll need strikethrough)

bold and italic are a different font (i.e. you use Times-Italic instead 
of Times-Roman)

Gabriele,  I want to thank you for such beautifull code prentation. 
Did you release the Litterate programming tool you use for this? 
Where do I look? Thanks

not yet, there are still parts of it that are very far from complete. 
i can release the version i'm using to those brave enough to try 
it out, but i think you really need to be brave. :)

the only publicly released part for now is the emitter: http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/MD3/emitters/wetan.html

anyway, i'm glad you like the presentation :) if you spot any typos, 
or find parts that are not clearly explained etc. (aside from the 
still missing parts), please let me know. the better that gets, the 
more people can work on it, fix bugs, add new features and so on 
 :)

gabriele, I noticed in Safari that the dialect specs page you posted, 
the table of contents and the disclaimer is layered on top of each 
other.

http://hmkdesign.dk/layoutbug.png

ok understood.

Actually, I am in the wrong group. I was talking about QML-Ed. Sorry!

pdf-maker does layers?

graham, the image is HTML from Safari

Henrik, do you have a fix for the CSS? (actually, i'd need someone 
to create a good CSS for wetan...) I have only tested it on Firefox 
so far.

Anton, ah, well, Reichart doesn't want underline in QML.

only strikethru is there.

I can see the logic and agree with that.  Umm, are you still thinking 
about it or should Underline be removed from the QML-ED reference 
?

ah, right... hmm, well, i think i should remove it from the reference, 
although underline is just commented out from the source. if ever 
reichart decides to add it back, i can readd it to the reference 
:)

ok, good :) one less confusion.

gabriele, looking at the source, I'm not sure it's enough to fix 
the CSS. it would be far easier to manage if the history and the 
license was wrapped in a table with two cells. the page actually 
also breaks when using Firefox and making the window narrow.

henrik, it does not necessarily need to appear that way. i prefer 
a semantic approach in the source. history and license are just two 
fields, how they are displayed depends on the CSS, not on the xhtml 
structure.

gabriele, well, anyway, I think it's not very easy to place up elements 
next to eachother in a controlled way other than by using a table. 
<div>s are nice, but there are limits to how much fiddling should 
be necessary.

then we don't place them next to each other. :)

pdf-maker updated (docs almost finished)

updated again.

new update. (notice that it produces funny results now in test.pdf, 
but this is only temporary). can now typeset lines of variable height.

new update - can now set fonts. (test.pdf now even more funny ;)

new update - check out test.pdf ;)

Very nice looking ! :)

URL?

http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/test.pdf

new update - now uses the total-fit algorithm for page breaking too. 
(major improvement wrt TeX). only works if columns have the same 
width (so there's no example of it in test.pdf yet)

new update - para alignments and a few other things. break-lines 
now always succeeds, at worst producing "ugly" output.

see test.pdf for an example of typesetting a long text into columns, 
with headers etc. (doesn't break just after a header and things like 
this)

I see the headers. I notice at the end of the second page, the final 
hyphenated word "improve-" does not continue on the next page.

first page you mean? it is intended, the textbox does not have enough 
space for all the text.

the current bug (which i'm going to fix now) is the "Introduction" 
not being hypenated in the small column in page 4.

Gab, this really looks great!! Getting the same output like TeX but 
without this chaotic installation and config stuff is very cute...

new update - finally fixed break-lines (more on this below), added 
widow/orphan penalties and setting of parameters like tolerance, 
interline glue and looseness (the latter allows increasing or decreasing 
the number of lines of a paragraph).

what the problem was with break-lines: as some of you probably know, 
when TeX cannot break a paragraph with a given stretch tolerance, 
it produces overfull boxes, assuming that in such a case manual intervention 
is desirable.

pdf maker can't do this, because manual intervention is in general 
not desirable. (i.e. an app that uses the pdf maker to produce invoices 
should not expect the user to manually fix the layout if there are 
problems)

so, contrary to TeX, it should produce underfull boxes, like any 
word processor would do.

initially i was first attempting to break lines with the normal tolerance, 
then increasing it if that failed. the problem with this approach 
is that the time needed by break-lines grows quickly with the tolerance; 
if we want it to never fail, we need to give it an infinite tolerance, 
which means considering all possible breaks, which takes forever.

so, i changed break-lines so that it never failed, but could insert 
emergency breaks if it was impossible to break the para with the 
given tolerance.

however, i underestimated the problem, since that was a source of 
infinite bugs... i wasn't doing it right.

after many attempts, i decided to think about how the algorithm was 
really supposed to work, so found a good way to implement emergency 
breaks... now i finally fixed all bugs with it and it is working 
fine.

note, that the result when using emergency breaks is not optimal. 
they are only used to allow break-lines to produce a result in all 
cases. increasing the tolerance is the only way to get optimal results.